Fifth Business (1970) reintroduced Mr. Davies after more than ten years to a very appreciative audience and some of the same characters appear here although the two novels are quite independent. Davies is a thoughtful, tasteful mediator in human affairs and while the earlier book was concerned with "moral bookkeeping," the audit here is psychoanalytical, attempting to release the submerged life of feeling of a rigid rationalist. He's David Staunton, a most successful Toronto lawyer, who suddenly finds he's lost control of himself in a theater shouting "Who killed Boy Staunton" — his father. Staunton senior had been found in his car at the bottom of a harbor with a stone in his mouth — pink granite. After this showy beginning calculated to arrest your attention, Staunton goes to the Jung Institute in Zurich where under the quiet Johanna von Haller he undertakes a Jungian analysis. Dr. von Haller keeps the Jungian cabalism to a minimum although you will be inducted from anima to persona to archetype (the manticore) while Staunton is forced to reconstruct/revise his relationships — primarily the lack of them — with his father, the non-existent women in his life, and his mother whom he was led to suspect had an affair with Dunstan Ramsay (a principal character in the previous book). The last inset which leaves David Staunton still uncommitted and which has also featured some startling circumstantialities suggests that this account may be resumed, if only to determine whether David will continue to live only the half life of the mind (esse in lntellectu solo). One questions whether all readers of the earlier book will be as comfortable in the penumbra of the collective unconscious; still Davies is a donnish, civilized and discreet guide. He also returns the novel to its primary domain so that it serves its resident characters on the level of insight rather than sensation.
Pub Date: Nov. 20, 1972
ISBN: 014303913X
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1972
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
